This is being posted just in time for Thanksgiving, 2020. I give thanks to all the folks who have participated either as audience or as featured readers in our Choola Needles Zoom Shelter-In-Place readings. Though I miss our live meetings tremendously, I can still give thanks that we have found a meeting alternative & we can continue building each other up. Enjoy the videos below & I hope I will be able to post more often in December! I give thanks to the over 150 videos that have been posted on our many Shelter-In-Place pages posted so far in 2020. As always, if you are browsing our pages, we consider YOU a part of our family and you are welcome to become part of our Shelter-In-Place video pages. Simply contact us at editor (@) chollaneedles.com* & ask how to get your videos posted on our pages. You can also use this address to send us your poetry, short stories, essays, and art for publication in our monthly magazine. [*for web newbies - when sending emails leave out the spaces & parenthesis when writing the email address].
Good Times!!! Enjoy the videos:
My first exposure to her work was the tightly constructed "an ordinary woman". This new book gives a good sampling from this book, and does the same for her other classic books, such as "The Book Of Light" and "The Terrible Stories". Lucille had a very specific style so when the poem appeared on a page you could smile with the familiar tones and say: "yes, I know I will learn from this word master." If you have many of her books, I could still recommend this one for carrying around to quite from, along with the uncollected poems which are included. Breaklight is a favorite from "an ordinary woman:"
breaklight
light keeps on breaking
i keep knowing
the language of other nations.
i keep hearing
tree talk
water words
and i keep knowing what they mean.
and light just keeps on breaking.
last night
the fears of my mother came
knocking and when i
opened the door
they tried to explain themselves
and i understood
everything they say.
A weaker poet would have called this breakthrough. "Use the common language of the day" is a common MFA mantra. By choosing breaklight Lucille allows us to go so much deeper into the psyche, and into our own past and learn through her language that we can begin to understand ourselves deeper just by listening to these times of light. You'll see her throughout her career in this book selecting exactly the right words to help us as readers understand ourselves, as well as those we come in contact with much better. As with any great poet, I do recommend reading Lucille Clifton aloud - so your eyes, mouth, and ears learn to appreciate her perfect manipulation of language. This is also a book I would recommend giving as a gift to friends who are looking for what poetry can do for our world.
from Terrible Stories:
dear fox
it is not my habit
to squat in the hungry desert
fingering stones, begging them
to heal, not me but the dry mornings
and bitter nights.
it is not your habit
to watch. none of this
is ours, sister fox.
tell yourself that anytime now
we will rise and walk away
from somebody else’s life.
any time.
If you read poetry as a reflection of our current society, the full book may be right up your alley. For me, the pessimism was just too much. Sure, I'm not happy with the current reality either, but as a reader, perhaps as a shallow person, I prefer work that keeps me enlightened and not angry enough to wish suicide over isolation.
The first poem opens with "I could complain. I’ve done it before. / I could explain." And then goes on for many more lines doing both. Complaining and explaining. The second poem, just as thick with anger, does have some poetic moments that at least help me appreciate Vijay's approach toward language: "Today is the day the self’s / whispering to itself in its hundred endangered languages merges / with the sound of water running and scoring grooves in the damp, / lithic, adhesive interiors". The third poem returns to the openly non-poetic complaining and explaining: "I’m fine with hatred. Pure, precise, self-modulating. / Waxing while the world wanes."
So, as my mother would say - if you have nothing good to say, don't say anything. The fourth and fifth poem are fun reads. Unlike most poets, who "pretend" that haphazard line breaks have deep symbolic meaning, Vijay openly plays with the same words in two different line breaks to prove neither change the meaning. This "playing" with the minds of poetry readers is exactly what we need. Someone willing to put together an essay of the meaninglessness of the way poets "pretend" they are saying something special. One only needs to listen to a poet read aloud their own words to discover they didn't really mean the line breaks to be there. They simply put them there so someone reading the work in the magazine thinks - it looks like a poem, so it must be a poem. I admire Vijay for taking the initiative to demonstrate how utterly meaningless the line breaks are. The poem (both poems are the same, one "thick", one "thin") is just as world-weary and pessimistic as the others: "I’ll meet if you really want to meet." It's the risk that he takes with form that I admire.
Poem seven has form and rhyme & as such make the poetry of the poem stand up and say: "I've been composed as a poem". Even so, the playful language keeps the book as dark as Vijay intends:
"He wants his mind relieved of you.
He wants his gun to talk to you,
embracing the murderous dialogue.
He doesn’t care that you’re just a dog."
Once in awhile Vijay creates a work that - while keeping the pessimism alive, at least raises a giggle:
"Marriage
You keep complaining that there are two people inside me—
the one confident, decisive, ironic;
the other a raging cripple
who never took to the nipple,
whose life has been one long
episode of colic.
Just admit you don’t know which one you like better,
which one rings your bell.
I happen to like them both."
I hope I've given you enough to decide for yourself if this is a book for you. I can picture certain stages of my life when I would have enjoyed this volume. For myself, in October 2020, when this book was released, it's not a book I'd give to a friend. I don't regret reading it - it is a quick read, and doesn't pretend to be a book you'd want to return to many times. I do appreciate it when a poet lets it be known - I'm getting this out of my system, and if you have any of it in your system, I hope my words will help you purge too. There is value in that for the folks who need it.
The final poem includes this:
"Talk about
being one with others!
We correspond 1 to 1, and there is a grandeur in this."
Click here to purchase this book.
